Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonmrodriguez | Hacker News Reader

Aw man I loved your comment right up to the point where you gave people a suggestion on how to make better surveillance tech :(

View on HN

Seriously. It's extremely important that we as engineers be ethical about what we build. If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare.

The problem is that a lot of people genuinely think "If a large institution approved of it, it must be good". Which is a lot scarier than people not giving a damn about good or evil.

Morality is not something you outsource.

The bigger problem is that many potentially evil things are really cool.

Things cannot be evil in and of themselves. It takes sentient intention that you judge to be so for it to be (to you).

I guess it's hard to prove, but I think certain objects are inherently correlated with good/evil. E.g. a torture device is inherently evil IMHO, and a vaccine is inherently good.

I guess you could kill with vaccine if you really wanted to, and you can have sex using torture device if you're into that kind of stuff.

Maybe for some object, but I can't think of any, and I don't think that vaccines or torture devices fit the bill. One could sell a spoiled, ineffective, tainted, or defective vaccine. That would be evil. Or, one could torture Hitler to learn how to disarm the doomsday machine.

The original vaccine is still good, and it's evil to torture anyone, even Hitler. I think you're stretching too far.

"Good" is inherently normative. Nothing can be "good" exterior to a normative claim. This is in contrast with "positive" statements, which are true regardless of anything happening to perceive them that way or not. The original vaccine, if it exists in a vacuum, is neither good nor bad, because there is nothing else to attach the normative claim to it.

Further - and while this is an entirely normative claim - if you would happen to agree that if you could save 1,000,000,000 lives by torturing one person for 5 seconds, that you should do so, then I would argue that torture is not inherently evil within your own normative value system.

>in a vacuum

It wouldn't be a 'vaccine' if it was in a vacuum, it would just be a vial of fluids. Once you have enough context to define vaccine, you can demonstrate that it is good.

>1,000,000,000 lives by torturing one person for 5 seconds

This argument is just obnoxious. Give me a moment.

...

You can play with all the numbers you want, they don't change the underlying act. Except to the extent that you make the time period so short it no longer qualifies as torture and you're not even asking a question any more.

A lot of people (probably the vast majority, at least in the West) also believe that, because you can occasionally vote on things, anything the government does is fine because, after all, "government is us."

Who, exactly, is this "lot of people" you refer to?

> "anything the government does is fine"

I have literally never met a single person who believes this. I have met someone who believes that anything the market does is fine (revealed preferences, doncha know?) but fortunately he's a minority, even among libertarians. If we instead interpret your statement as hyperbole with the intention of accusing people of complacency, then...

http://xkcd.com/610/

... you're no better.

Right, so "anything the government does is fine" was a really bad way to phrase it. What I meant is that many people have the same attitude toward government as the attitude toward markets that you reference. It's not necessarily that they agree with or personally like all actions of government, but rather that they believe that the fundamental workings of government are sound, and that the occasional disagreeable actions are acceptable because this is simply how society has chosen to come together and solve certain issues.

Many people also go further, and claim that even when there are unjust government laws or actions, they should not be disobeyed or resisted, and that political action is the only valid approach to disagreeable actions of government. This is extremely common in any discussion about police violence.

Ethical engineering is important. With great capability comes great responsibility. This is why I think it is good for engineering students to take as many courses in the humanities and liberal arts as possible, to get better perspectives on the world we're all building for.

Or they could just make sure the have a good spidey collection.

There is a lot of ethical uses of such trackers (e.g. a company tracking its own vehicles, shipping container tracking, etc.). We can't assume the developer of the original board knowingly designed it for evil purposes.

Full disclosure: I design smart-grid and telemetry applications, including a GSM + GPS device (GPS was initially used for getting accurate timestamps, but we also added positioning registers, which made the field maintenance people very happy).

Interesting, I always thought that google using it for TrueTime was a strange use-case, but I guess it was the original use-case!

That's a pretty common application when you need to synchronize clocks to microsecond accuracy or to a second accuracy but have neither a stable network connection nor a time broadcast (like the German DCF77). It's also used to replace Cesium clocks in cell base stations or for the precision timing protocol (IEEE 1588) for PWE3 networks.

Iep, is there a lot of systems depending on GPS and a major system failure will bring us some chaos.

> There is a lot of ethical uses of such trackers (e.g. a company tracking its own vehicles, shipping container tracking, etc.)

Never mind court-warranted law enforcement tracking of legitimate suspects under investigation.

>If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare.

I honestly do not know how those working for the NSA, GCHQ, etc. can live with themselves for the damage they're doing. Snowden said he was getting something like $120k p/a as a consultant for the NSA, so it's not like it's massively financially lucrative.

A friend of a friend suggested to me that a job in his team would suit me. I said I refuse to make weapons or spy on people.

He said he liked "catching baddies".

A good designer would know how to make the device harder to muck with, they don't need help in the form of comments on web forums. There are whole companies (in the financial and security sectors) whose job is to create devices that are difficult to tamper with.

Here, it looks like they didn't even try, or if they did, their designer wasn't very good.

the people working on surveillance tech already know how to do it better. the comment was for the rest of us to get a glimpse of how the tech might be modified if it became cost effective to do so.

also i'd think the more we know how to make better surveillance, the better someone can build systems that can subvert it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com